Alexa Nikolas, actress and ex-wife of Rhye frontman Michael Milosh, accused the musician of sexual abuse, gas lighting and preparation in a series of extensive Instagram posts shared on Sunday.
In his open letter, entitled “Groomed by the Groom”, Nikolas accuses Milosh of being an efebophile – a person attracted mainly by teenagers between 15 and 19 years old – and states that the Canadian musician prepared her for “a green card, success, and sex. ”
Milosh originally formed Rhye in 2010 with Danish instrumentalist Robin Hannibal, and drew critical acclaim in 2013 for the project’s successful album Woman. The album won three and a half stars Rolling Stone and was listed for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize. Hannibal left the group in 2017, and Milosh continues to operate Rhye as a collective, releasing three more albums: 2018 Blood, 2019 Spirit and 2021 House, launched last January.
This is not the first time that Nikolas has spoken publicly about his relationship with Milosh: she refers to a 2018 profile in Verse magazine in which she opened up about meeting Milosh when she was 16 and he 33, although her description of their relationship at the time was largely positive. In his Instagram post, Nikolas states that Milosh and his representatives tried to remove the Verse article after it was published, although she had not accused him of abuse in it.
“I didn’t say anything harmful and I even retained many truths for fear that he wouldn’t help me financially during our separation,” she writes, referring to the divorce in progress at the time the article was published. “In my opinion, the reason he was so adamant about canceling the interview is because Milosh was talking to me when I was 16.”
Nikolas then proceeds to give a more detailed account of how she met Milosh, describing how she contacted him via MySpace in 2008. She claims that they started a remote “flirt” relationship via text, email and Skype video chat, with Milosh asking several times to meet in person under the pretext of wanting to photograph her. One such request included asking to be with Nikolas and his mother in Los Angeles when she was still 16, which she ignored. Nikolas says Milosh knew that she was a minor at the time.
On her 18th birthday, Nikolas says Milosh invited her to fly to Berlin, where he was staying at the time with a friend, although he asked them to stay in a separate apartment and to pay for it. Nikolas agreed, saying that she “felt bad for him and for his pride as a fighting artist”. She later learned that the 300 euros she paid to cover a week’s stay was used by Milosh to cover the entire month’s rent.
Nikolas then details her first sexual encounter with Milosh on her first night together in Berlin, in which she claims he forced her to engage in anal penetration and vaginal intercourse without a condom. She remembers e-mailing a friend later that night, asking for help and saying she would rather stay in a hotel, and included screenshots of her conversation in the letter.
Nikolas later says that she and Milosh continued a sexual relationship and that she was a model for several of her photos, including what would later become the single cover of “Don’t Pull Away”. She also claims that the songs Milosh would write for Rhye’s 2013 release album Woman they were about her. (“The album is called Woman because I was still a girl, ”she said Verse in 2018. “The song ‘Woman’ was a harbinger of the woman I was going to become.”) This includes the song “Major Minor Love”, which she claims to be specifically about her and Milosh having anal sex, and which Milosh said to her that the major / minor tone of the song referred to her still being minor when they started the relationship.
“In retrospect, reading those lyrics is deeply disturbing,” writes Nikolas. “Now, every word of that song scares me completely. I suggest you go and read them with a new perspective. It’s a song about taking care of a girl and turning on the gas light. ”(A representative from Rhye did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
After maintaining a long-distance relationship for several months – while Milosh supposedly still lived in Berlin with his girlfriend at the time – Nikolas says Milosh asked if he could stay with her while recording music in Los Angeles. Nikolas claims that she paid for his flight to Los Angeles and says that “in all the time he stayed with me, he never offered a single cent for gas or food.” She also claimed that Milosh told her to “get over” a traumatic sexual encounter that she had with another partner, and that sometimes he would have physical explosions, “punching the fridge and candles … Creating several dents in my fridge and even hurting his own hand during the process. ”
Milosh ended up proposing to Nikolas when she was 19, after dating for six months. Later, she accompanied Rhye on tour for Woman, where Nikolas claims Milosh has repeatedly denied sex to her because she refused to have anal penetration. She writes that, years later, she looked at Milosh’s e-mails and found a message from Rhye’s record label stating that they would not proceed with the project if he did not obtain a visa for the United States. “All of this happened right before he proposed to me,” writes Nikolas. “So you can connect the dots on this one.” She also claims that the marriage impacted her career, writing that she “was not feeling creatively inspired by the projects that were coming my way. I didn’t have the time or the energy to face all the stress of my marriage.
She continued to accompany Milosh on the tour throughout 2016 and describes the relationship slowly falling apart, with her struggling with alcoholism and getting involved in love affairs. At one point, Nikolas says that after experiencing an anxiety attack, she claims that Milosh “came up against me, grabbed me, pushed me on the couch and pressed his forearm to my throat and screamed continuously, ‘shut up, shut the fuck up. shut the fuck up! ‘I couldn’t breathe. ”
Nikolas recounts his attempts to fix the relationship – including joint therapy sessions – before finally deciding on the divorce, with procedures that lasted more than three years. “I wanted it to end, I wanted a divorce dividing everything 50/50, but he delayed the process,” she writes. “He made me look like a gold digging monster, everything revolved around his money. But now that I was fighting for money, it was at his whim, which I think he liked because it gave him control and power over me. Nikolas also provides several screenshots of his conversations with Milosh during the divorce process.
“Until today I think he was preparing me since I was 16 and I think he got everything he wanted from this situation, he got financial support as a fighting artist, a green card to continue his career, notierty [sic]and sex, ”she writes. “To this day, I still suffer from PTSD because of that relationship, even though I doubt my own sanity on some days.”